How To Narrow Your Focus To Get More Clients

This week, I had an email exchange with a practitioner who doesn’t know how to narrow her focus.

Everywhere she looks—within her family, in her community, in the sphere of her own interests and the benefit she herself got from her modality—she sees people who need help and ways she could point her practice.

How can she choose?

This is a lament I hear often from practitioners, and so I thought you might like to know what I told her about narrowing focus and finding your ideal clients…

Narrowing your focus happens in 3 stages

As in most areas of life, there are “approximations” in finding your clients.

That means you should expect that who you’re looking for will change over time—as you gain experience and knowledge in your modality, and also as you learn more about yourself.

That includes realizing which clients drain you and which ones give you energy—and how to recognize them.

It also includes understanding more about your purpose… why you’re here, the gifts you bring and how they send a clear message to the people you are uniquely designed to help.

In the beginning

The first stage is the one most practitioners step into when they graduate. At that point, there are so many possibilities that your mind can spin for a long time trying to pick one.

Knowing that the amount of experience you’ve got can only increase, you probably aren’t inclined to turn anyone away because every person offers an opportunity to learn more about people, your modality and yourself.

So keep in mind that the point of narrowing your focus is to make your marketing efforts more efficient in terms of time, money, energy, and results—it’s not about saying you only work with people who have back pain, or women who are pregnant.

You can start with the problem people are trying to solve or the kind of “who my client is on a surface level” demographics that online marketers are very fond of writing about. At this stage, as long as you know you can help, you can flip a coin because it doesn’t really matter. It’s useful to try with different kinds of people and problems because you can realize that you feel pulled toward some folks and not so much toward others.

I suggest you stick with one idea for at least six months so that you can relax and see what’s happening. As you begin to realize that you can help people concretely, you’ll feel like you’ve taken a big step forward.

The next step

Once people are consistently coming in the door and staying for a while, you can refine your focus by looking at the clients you most like working with.

What are the qualities they have in common?

Why do you like working with them?

How do they make you feel?

The better you feel about yourself, the more people you can help, so at this point, your focus is on discovering which clients give you energy and make you feel good about being a practitioner.

You might hear inner voices pushing back on that because the idea of “ideal client” doesn’t always fit in what the notion that your modality helps “everyone.” Again, remember that focusing doesn’t mean you have to say “NO” to anyone you want to work with. It’s a way to find clients more easily so you can help more people.

The ultimate step in focusing your practice

We may never know who actually said that the two most important days of your life are the day you’re born and the day you find out why.

What matters is that someone did, because that second day is the ultimate step I’m talking about. Discovering why you’re here and what you’re supposed to do about it —that’s the most important thing that can happen to you as a practitioner if your intention is to offer transformation! At that point, you know exactly who your clients are because they are the ones you are uniquely designed to serve.

They are the ones who can be helped by the Life PhD you’ve acquired from childhood until now. These are the people you’re here to help in ways no one else can help, the ones who share a wound bond with you and look to you because when you speak, you speak directly to them and they know it.

When you get to that point, your practice is rooted in your own power, and you are helping more people because your clients can clearly identify themselves. You find that the people who respond to you are happy to go deeper, stay longer, get more from your work. You begin to see that your desire to help people transform isn’t just a wish… it’s a reality.

Take it inside

To get a glimpse of this for yourself, go inside and get quiet. Have a look around and listen deeply… and ask yourself….

What do you “get” about why you’re here?

What does that quiet voice have to tell you?

What is your bigger purpose?

What are you here to do?

And what’s stopping you?

What I’m here to do

…is support you in becoming a transformational leader, so you can stop fixing clients and start leading them into their highest selves.

If you feel like you’re here for something bigger and haven’t been able to tap into it yet, let’s talk and find out if I can help… because you don’t have to do this alone!